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As interest in cultural sociology has risen in recent decades, so too has Notre Dame's investment in its faculty.

"We've been growing over the past 20 years, but in the last five years it has all come together," says cultural sociologist Lyn Spillman, an associate professor who has studied American political and economic culture.

The question "What is a person?" has occupied the minds of philosophers and theologians for centuries. But University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith argues in his latest book that the question also lies at the center of the social scientist's quest to understand social life.

What is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up presents a new model for social theory

Research led by Professor Rory McVeigh, chair of the Department of Sociology, has identified two community characteristics that, when present, appear to increase opposition to same-sex marriage.

The study, co-authored with 2010 Ph.D. recipient Maria-Elena Diaz, was the featured article in the December 2009 issue of the American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association.

Next spring, graduate students in Notre Dame’s Sociology Department will host the 13th Annual Chicago Ethnography Conference, a yearly event organized by a team of students from major Midwestern universities, including the University of Notre Dame, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and DePaul University. Notre Dame became an affiliate member of the group last year and is playing host to the conference for the first time.…

Day-to-day life for graduate students is defined by the need to make a scholarly contribution to their chosen field of study. This intense focus drives these students to spend their days—and nights—doing research and analysis, writing and presenting papers, and, ultimately, submitting their work for publication in peer-reviewed journals.…

The Department of Sociology’s Center for the Study of Social Movements has adopted a strategy that brings together young scholars and seasoned professionals to help the flow of ideas flourish across academic generations. It’s an approach that’s also enriching the experience of Notre Dame graduate students while bearing witness to that old adage about imitation and flattery.

In the past, the center’s presentation of its annual John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior has followed a familiar format, with the winner recognized at a banquet attended by his or her colleagues.

On Oct. 28, 1967, a white police officer pulled over a black man in Oakland, Calif. Both men got shot, and the policeman died. Who pulled a gun first? And what happened after the shooting?

The answers depend, says Christian Davenport, a professor of peace studies, political science, and sociology, on which news source you consult—the radical black newspaper (the black man was Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panthers), the moderate black newspaper, the radical white newspaper, the conservative Bay Area newspaper, or The New York Times.

Like many good ideas, this one required some financial assistance to get off the ground... Maeve Raphelson ’10 and eight other Notre Dame students had been asked by friend and fellow senior Javier Soegaard to accompany him to Puerto Rico to work with some kids in a local school. Problem was, they couldn’t afford to make the trip.

So Raphelson came up with the idea of combining field research with the service work. “I proposed that we also try to do some research while there,” she says, “and we all applied for different sources of funding.”

Turning the pages of Assistant Professor Erika Summers-Effler’s new book, Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes:
Emotional Rhythms in Social Movement Groups, it won’t be long before readers notice they are not working their way through a typical sociology text. Summers-Effler’s lively storytelling veers off into three different directions at once, and it’s loaded with stories, comments, and vibrant details from real life that would be quite at home in a piece of narrative journalism.